Cordelia Knott, exhausted after being jostled for miles in the darkness on an old wagon, took a long look at her future, and it wasn’t very appealing.

This was 1914 — long before the familiar fried chicken dinners and boysenberry pies and amusement park at Knott’s Berry Farm. Struggling to keep her infant daughter bundled up in the winter cold, Cordelia viewed the rundown adobe house in the desert, with only two rooms, no running water and an outhouse out back.

“How do you like it, Cordelia?” asked her husband Walter, knowing she hadn’t been very enthusiastic about leaving their home in Pomona in the first place.

“Her eyes dampened and she struggled against her greater tears, as the alien sights and smells pressed in upon her,” wrote Roger Holmes and Paul Bradley in their 1956 book “Fabulous Farmer,” about the lives of the Knotts.

“Let’s go in, Walter. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Thus began the desert saga of the Knotts, building a life miles from almost nowhere.

This rustic venture was a desire of Walter’s to homestead the High Desert sands of San Bernardino County. The place, about five miles from Newberry Springs, was quite a contrast to a relatively comfortable life the couple had in Pomona, with a nice house and a regular income.

But Walter, born in San Bernardino and raised in Pomona, had gone out on his own several years earlier and became fairly successful farming in the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Then, with money earned from his hard work, he returned home and married Cordelia.

Walter Knott in the Mojave Desert. (Courtesy photo)

Living in the city wasn’t really what Walter wanted, and he soon convinced his young wife they could prosper homesteading on 160 acres near Newberry Springs. Neither had any idea how hard it would be.

“When we got to the desert I learned that if I needed something, I had to do it yourself,” Walter recalled in a 1965 oral history given at UCLA. “It was 25 miles to a blacksmith shop, a barber shop, a dentist or a doctor.” And most everything else.

“Fabulous Farmer” told of one long day for Cordelia while suffering from a severe toothache. She had to drive the wagon to Newberry Springs, catch a midnight train to Barstow where she sat in front of the dentist’s office from 1 a.m. until it opened, and then after being treated retraced her steps.

Later improvements were made to their house, but Cordelia had to draw water from outside, carrying it in one bucket at a time — just one of many hardships she faced there.

And there were plenty of difficulties for Walter who found wind-blown sand made farming almost impossible there, especially with a well that was inadequate for providing irrigation for his ambitious plans.

As farming proved impractical, Walter was hired at the long-abandoned mining town of Calico some distance from their homestead. The mines there had been closed for years, including the rich Silver King mine once owned by his uncle and former county Sheriff John C. King.

Walter recalled working with several middle-European immigrants employed by investors planning to begin processing the mine tailings left over from past operations. He had to live in a Calico bunkhouse too far away for him to go back and forth from Cordelia and the children each workday.

The first night, Walter found the bunkhouse was stifling because his fellow workmen demanded the doors and windows be kept tightly closed, so he put his gear outside and slept under the stars. That morning, the men were shocked he wasn’t dead — They’d been told to keep “the doors shut for fear rattlesnakes would come in and get into their bunks.” He straightened them out and got their sleeping quarters a little more ventilation.

It was also during this period that Walter also got a chance to walk around the ruins of Calico and explore the old mines. Years later, of course, he bought the town and duplicated many of its features at his Knott’s Berry Farm ghost town. Later, the fixed-up Calico was given to San Bernardino County for today’s regional park.

It only took a few weeks for Walter to suspect that restarting Calico’s mines was merely a get-rich scheme by his bosses to attract unwary investors. He quit and went to work for the county road department, another job taking him away from his family for days.

The Knotts, now with three kids, managed to endure more than three years in the desert giving them full ownership of the property. But it was obvious, they all needed a change of scenery and income.

Walter loaded the family and everything they owned into a wagon. For three weeks, they trekked over Cajon Pass, across the Inland Empire on what would later be Route 66 and out to the rural San Luis Obispo County community of Shandon. There he worked as a sharecropper for a couple of years and ultimately made enough money to buy the agricultural land in Buena Park where their Knott’s Berry Farm would become a Southern California attraction.

But the High Desert experience always remained special for Walter and his family.

“I spent 3½ years on the desert,” he recalled in the 1965 oral history. “We went broke and lost all that we had and had to drive away with our horses and wagon, but it was probably the best 3½ years of my life.”

Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe.blackstock@gmail.com or Twitter @JoeBlackstock.